15 June 2014 4:07 PM

"Blast the Hell Out of Them" - some thoughts on the 'Special Relationship'

This article appeared in the Mail on Sunday of 14th June 2014

Britain and the USA have come far closer to open armed combat with each other in modern times than most people realize. In many ways, this was the biggest war in modern history that never happened.

Tired of being told about a ‘special relationship’ that didn’t seem to me to exist – and which nobody in Washington DC has ever heard of - I decided to look into what really went on between our two countries.

And I found plenty of things which will shock anyone used to the standard ‘shoulder to shoulder’ sentimental view of the links between London and Washington.

And, as I researched the subject for a BBC Radio 4 programme (‘The Special Relationship : Uncovered’, to be transmitted at 8.00 p.m. on Monday 23rd June) I came across a rare and long-hidden sound archive that will, I think, surprise all who listen to it.

In the silence of a library at Princeton University, the ancient tape-recording begins to play, and the gruff voice of Admiral Arleigh Burke speaks from beyond the grave. I and the librarian, are the first people to have listened to it since it was made in January 1966, almost 50 years ago.

Burke, one of the US Navy’s greatest fighting sailors, is recalling a conversation with John Foster Dulles, Eisenhower’s Secretary of State.

Dulles has just wondered out loud if there is any way to stop Britain’s Fleet from launching its attack on Suez in 1956.

Admiral Burke describes his reply: ‘And I said, “Mr Secretary, there is only one way to stop them. We can stop them. But we will blast the hell out of them”.

‘He [Dulles] said “Can’t you stop them some other way?”

‘I said “No. if we’re going to threaten, if we’re going to turn on them, then you’ve got to be ready to shoot. I can’t give these people orders to do something. They can’t do it in the first place – no matter who gives them orders – to demand and then get laughed at. The only way you can stop them is to shoot. And we can do that. We can defeat them – the British and the French and the Egyptians and the Israelis – the whole goddam works of them we can knock off, if you want. But that’s the only way to do it’

He then sent orders to the Admiral in charge of the US Sixth Fleet, Cat Brown, “I gave him orders to go to sea, to be prepared for anything, to have his bombs up, to be checked out, so that we would be ready to fight either another naval force or against land targets – and to make sure of all his targeting data - a little cautionary dispatch - but it ended up to be prepared for any war eventuality.’

‘Cat Brown sent back: “Who’s the enemy?”

And I sent back “Don’t take any guff from anybody”

History records (though few know this either) that America’s Sixth Fleet duly stalked our ships, fouling our sonar and radar, shining their searchlights at French and British ships by night.

Admiral Sir Robin Durnford-Slater, second-in-command of Britain’s Mediterranean Fleet, complained to his superiors ‘We have already twice intercepted US aircraft and there is constant danger of an incident. Have been continually menaced during past eight hours by US aircraft approaching low down as close as 4000 yards and on two occasions flying over ships’.

General Sir Charles Keightley, Commander of Middle East land forces, wrote afterwards ‘It was the action of the US which really defeated us in attaining our object. He complained that the movements of the US Sixth Fleet ‘endangered the whole of our relations with that country’.

Washington, in the end, pulled the plug on our Suez invasion by threatening a run on the Pound Sterling. But the naval clashes are barely known to the British or American public.

There is a wry footnote to this. Arleigh Burke himself was honoured by having an entire class of Destroyers named after him. And one of these – the USS Winston S. Churchill – flies the British White Ensign alongside the Stars and Stripes, and usually carries a Royal Navy officer on her bridge.

We are so used to seeing those two flags flying side by side, that we forget that they have not always done so. The USA’s national anthem, ‘The Star-Spangled banner’ actually describes a British bombardment of Baltimore in 1813, and one of its less-frequently sung verses uses the words ‘their blood has washed out their foul footsteps’ pollution’. To refer to us, the British invader.

Ancient history? Not really. Tough rivalry has been at the core of our relationships from the start. Border disputes about Canada and clashes in the Caribbean troubled both sides. After we built a commerce raider for the Confederates during the Civil War, the victorious North was so furious that it demanded the whole of Canada as recompense (settling in the end for the equivalent of several billion pounds).

In the years after World War One, Britain was forced by a series of treaties to accept that the US Navy was catching up in size, power and global reach.

But in many ways the low-point came in the 1930s. Many Americans, and most American politicians, mistrusted and disliked Britain as snobbish, untrustworthy and colonialist. They thought we had misled them into joining the First World War. They were also angry that we had defaulted on our war debts.

If we wanted to fight another European war, they said, we would have to pay for it ourselves – and they were not joining in. This was not – as it is now portrayed – the view of a minority of pro-German Nazi sympathizers in the isolationist mid-west.

In fact it began among liberal-minded college students at Yale. Two future presidents – John F.Kennedy and Gerald Ford – were supporters of the ‘America First’ movement which campaigned for America to stay out and leave us to stew in our own juice. So was Kingman Brewster, who would one day be American ambassador to London.

Oddly enough, Americans know all this – it is all described in a powerful book by Lynne Olson, well-entitled ‘Those Angry Days’ , which was on US bestseller lists for months but is unknown here.

But not as unknown as the he secret drama which resulted from America’s cold indifference to Britain’s solitary plight in 1939 and 1940.

This amazing episode is left out of all major histories. It concerns the transfer of the British Empire’s entire life savings to North America, in a series of secret and increasingly frantic convoys.

The money was not just payment for war supplies. In the end, this huge handover of wealth, in Gold and securities, was first used to get round Congressional rules forbidding us to buy war material on credit. The first ultra-secret shipment of gold actually went in the warships which accompanied George VI and Queen Elizabeth on their tour of Canada in the USA a few months before war broke out.

But later the increasingly heavy payments (most of which are still in US vaults in Fort Knox) were used to persuade a bitter and unsentimental US Congress that Britain was so broke that if Congress did not support lend-Lease, Hitler would win and the Americans would face an untamed Germany across the Atlantic.

Semi-secret records, uncovered in the 1970s by the veteran journalist Alfred Draper, record the rapidly increasing tonnage of gold, usually carried by heavily-armoured warships in small fast convoys, being hurried to the USA via Canada. We may never know how much of this gold was sent to the USA – at least £500,000,000 at 1940 prices, an immense sum by any calculation of today’s values. But by handing it to the USA we completely altered the balance of wealth between the old world and the new, forever.

One particularly bitter incident caused Churchill to rage privately that America was acting like a bailiff seizing the goods of a bankrupt. Britain was brusquely ordered by Franklin Roosevelt to hand over all the gold we had gathered in South Africa. The American cruiser Louisville was despatched to collect it, carefully floodlighting her neutral flag as she made her way across the South Atlantic.

British businesses in the USA, including the very profitable American Viscose, were sold off at knock-down prices.

Churchill, who described these actions as ‘harsh and painful’, wrote later ‘I had a feeling that these steps were taken to emphasize the hardship of our position and raise feeling against the Opponents of Lend-Lease’. But at the time British diplomats in Washington had to use all their skill persuade the premier to tear up a letter of great bitterness and reproach which he wanted to send to the President.

The Canadian-born Lord Beaverbrook, then Minister of Aircraft Production and Churchill’s close friend, wrote to the Prime Minister ‘They [The Americans] have conceded nothing. They have exacted payment to the uttermost for all they have done for us. They have taken our bases without valuable consideration. They have been given our secrets and offered us a thoroughly inadequate service in return’.

All this was the background to the very moving meeting between Churchill and Roosevelt at Placentia Bay, Newfoundland, in August 1941. The BBC was able to find very rare sound archives of sailors from both American and British navies, singing the hymn ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’, as part of a joint service held on the decks of mighty warships from both nations.

But the seeming unity was a fake. Churchill once again was frustrated and disappointed by the meeting. The ‘Atlantic Charter’ which resulted threatened Britain’s empire and its naval dominance. And the USA still would not join the war. In the end, in one of modern history’s most awkward and unexpected facts, it would be Hitler who declared war on the USA, rather than the other way round.

This bleak, cold unsentimentality was not accidental or isolated. It continued throughout the war and beyond.

The Bretton Woods conference, in 1944, made it clear that the USA would usurp Britan’s economic dominance once the war was over. Britain’s Maynard Keynes fought hard to save something from the wreck but the USA’s negotiator, Harry Dexter White, is now known to have been a secret Soviet agent who had no interest in helping Britain recover her former glory.

The interesting question is whether White would have behaved any less brutally if he hadn’t been working for Stalin as well as Roosevelt.

The USA accepted our vital help with developing the Atom Bomb, then abruptly shut us out of its own post-war nuclear secrets, claiming it could not find a co-operation agreement made by Roosevelt and Churchill at FDR’s Hyde Park country home.

Peter Hitchens's programme on the 'Special Relationship' will be broadcast on BBC Radio 4 qt 8.00 pm on Monday 23rd June.

Peter Hitchens is no Christopher, for certain. Eurosceptics are laughable anyway, but he is in a class all by himself. The primary component of this diatribe is the Suez Crisis and there is no other offered historical evidence regarding the other accusations. It's just speculation and political grandstanding, and quite honestly, I'm shocked that right-wing British people are so adamant that the US is some kind of overlord. Your own history up until the 1950's puts those types of people into the pot-kettle class.

Mr. Hitchens tends to overlook the other player in the Suez game, the Russians. They were quite willing to send lots of warships into the area while Britain and France were acting like the former colonial overlords they were with regards to Egypt. Oddly enough, the joke was on Egypt since the Russians weren't much of an ally either. Regardless, no one wanted to contemplate that kind of a fight with those powers in that place. Seems the only people who were truly interested in keeping Nasser in check was the US, but that's OK.

Also, isn't it odd that the US and the UK have been very staunch allies ever since the US went into Europe for no reason other than to help allies and become a member of the global community. The US doesn't even have colonies unless you wanted to count the silly islands in the Pacific who would scream bloody murder if they were cut loose. Oh, and the one moron President that decided the Phillipines was a good idea. But on the whole, the US hasn't owned the territory, they just exploit the resources and the population. Same as the UK and Europe do with their smaller country relationships. Wow!

Hitchens is a very bright man, but he's a completely blind tool of the Eurosceptic wing of the Conservative Party, not to mention a complete apologist and a boor when it comes to the religious side of life. The more I read this article, the more I thought that perhaps the US could do without "allies" such as the UK if that is what the majority of the population believes. I doubt the US would lose much sleep other than a travesty of history and a seriously bent geopolitical viewpoint.

I think that the USA did not attack the Royal Navy for the same reason that Wilson knew he could not take any military action against Southern Rhodesia during the UDI crisis. An attack ordered on Kith and Kin would be devastating internally as well as externally and may well have resulted in mutiny.

It perhaps demonstrates that cultural links are stronger than any state and equally shows that where those cultural links do not exist, as with us and the EU, the enterprise cannot last. The USA hostility outlined by Peter is against the British establishment, not the British people, something the British people are now waking up to, as seen by support for UKIP.

Your response on the subject of the French nuclear deterrent, war-mongering French Socialists, and the thought of a possible invasion of this country, failed to enlighten me as to whether your alarming forecast was of a serious nature.

With some 300/400,000 French nationals living happily (apparently) in London, I think a clearer explantion is necessary, if for no other reason than to dispel any possible suspicion that your thoughts are somewhat on the daft side of rambling...

Why don't you mention Plan Omega, the clandestine and long-term plan the CIA had developed to topple Nasser from March 1956 onwards? British ministers were informed of this and invited to take part. Dulles told both Eisenhower and Selwyn Lloyd in November 1956 that he was amazed the British backed down so readily: "If you had so much as winked at us...." he said.

If the transfer of our gold to the USA signalled the end of British power, the transfer of American Gold to destinations outside the USA , principally to China, signals the end of American domination.

Some people who ought to know, such as the Boss of Pimco, the world's largest bond trader, think that the idea that there is any gold left in Fort Knox is a deliberately fostered, pure smoke and mirrors illusion.

For example, In spite of allegedly holding 8133 tons of its own gold as well as 1536 tons of German gold, when the Germans asked for 674 tons their gold to be sent back to Germany, the Americans could only agree to sending it back over 8 years, ie at the rate of 84 tons per year, Of that 84 tons, the Germans have received only 5 tons, yes 5 tons, this year.

The Americans are clearly struggling to get together even 84 tons of gold. The growing suspicion is that they have simply sold their stocks and the stocks of other countries they are supposed to be keeping in safety. Meantime the Chinese, the Russians and others such as the Arabs are building up their stocks as a hedge for when the Dollar collapses and to replace it with a Gold backed substitute currency.

As the US sinks under the weight of its enormous debts, paid hitherto by recourse to the printing presses, kept afloat only because other countries needed dollars to buy oil, the future for the dollar as the world's reserve currency looks very gloomy indeed. It is now worth one twentieth of its value when it came off the gold standard. The middle class in America has seen no rise in living standards since the 1960's.

Desperate Trouble for the USA as the Dollar collapses and the standard of living of Americans sinks dramatically spells trouble for us as well.

Mr Hitchens:, With regard to US policy towards the British Empire in 1940 and 1941, I do think you are overlooking rather an important point. It did seem quite likely from May of 1940 on that Britain might very well surrender to Germany, whatever aid the USA did or did not offer. Had the United Kingdom surrendered, Germany would no doubt have helped itself to whatever of its holdings, military, territorial, and financial, it could. Therefore, it would have been preposterously irresponsible of the USA, not only to ship weapons and other supplies to a power that was on the verge of surrendering and handing those supplies over to Nazi Germany, but also to allow that same Nazi Germany to lay claim to financial assets that would make it the leading power in Latin America, a major presence in the corporate economy of the USA, and a not-inconsiderable naval power in the Western hemisphere.

I think you will find the Tornado was produced by the multi-national Panavia consortium and its engines by Turbo Union. The second generation Harrier was a MDD/BAe developed and built aircraft. As for weapons, the sidewinder and Sparrow were American missiles and droppable stores were American and European. Even ecm pods and chaff dispensers were made in Sweden. Aeroplanes are such complicated systems that only the biggest economies can build everything nowadays.

Having proven we are clearly a vassal state of the USA, we can still help shape American public opinion. For example, when Obama wanted to bomb Syria, the American press said "even the Brits arent coming", or words to that effect. We help give the White House the moral backing for war. Although last time we let them down the warmongering French socialists stepped in.

But it was that, even so. $1,000,000,000 in material - eventually $50,000,000,000 - is no small amount of aid. And this was from a country beholden to its 'Neutrality Acts' and which viewed another European war with fear and foreboding.

Peter Hitchens has argued that Britain committed a terrible act of folly by entering World War Two when and as she did. That being so, perhaps British foreign policy had made the USA astounded and perturbed as well as 'bitter' and 'cold'. Why should a nation involve itself in a quarrel in a far away country whose prosecution has been informed by an insane diplomacy? Now the USA seems to answer this question differently, and hardly needs to be coaxed into belligerence by Britain.

I've wondered whether the world is in worse condition because the USA inherited (or usurped) Britain's empire. But now I wonder whether Britain was fit to maintain her empire after the political follies that surround both world wars, and especially when *England's* perceived national self-interest did not align with the self-interest of the other nations under British dominion. An empire is a complicated thing.

I think it is safe to say that the special relationship is a myth,the USA are only friendly when they want something.Reagan used Thatcher in the same way Bush used Blair.Obama virtually ignored Gordon Brown and has been very cool towards Cameron.The USA is now using Australia in the same way it used Britain.
I hope David Cameron ignores Tony Blair's idiotic views on what should be done in Iraq.its not often I agree with Clare short but she was spot on about Blair.
If only we had a prime minister with the guts to tell America to fight your own wars and concentrate on your own faltering nation instead of interfering in others business.

@ Stef
A belated response Stef . Those ignorant of History are fated to repeat it. Is a very misdirectional dictum . For History as written is a fiction .
Those that toe that line are implicit in our destruction. For the reality is, they will not identify the malignancy that has put us where we are.

You make no mention of Plan Omega, the clandestine and long-term plan the CIA had developed to topple Nasser from March 1956 onwards. British ministers were informed of this and invited to take part. Dulles told both Eisenhower and Selwyn Lloyd in November 1956 that he was amazed the British backed down so readily: "If you had so much as winked at us...." he said.

And if the Special Relationship was so one-sided, why was Eisenhower prepared to "throw the bucket" at the Soviets, ie launch a nuclear attack, if they attacked British and French forces in support of their new Egyptian allies?

"Divided We Stand: Britain, the US and the Suez Crisis: Britain, the United States and the Suez Crisis" by W Scott Lucas, 1991, covered the same ground a quarter of a century ago.

Miranda - surely we have been a "vassall state" since the Lisbon Treaty, or at least a part of another state, the EU. But our "pariah" satus (on leaving the EU) would only be insofar as the other states did not want to do business with us (that is, sell their products to us), which they would surely wish to do. If you hold the widely-accepted view that the US likes us to join it in foreign adventures (eg. Iraq), where we can do the dirty work, the US might be a bit pleased that we were independent (from the EU) in that we might have some military hardware/forces to assist them (Germany and France will not; one side of US thinking might favour the EU, but many Americans put no trust in Germany and France) - but that is to posit a future non-EU Britain which decides/is able to rebuild its armed forces.

Well, with regard to US policy towards the British Empire in 1940 and 1941, I do think you are overlooking rather an important point. It did seem quite likely from May of 1940 on that Britain might very well surrender to Germany. The expectation that Britain would surrender seems to have motivated, for example, Hitler's declaration of war on the USA. Without Britain among the allied powers, the USA would have been as impotent in Europe in the 1940s as Britain and France were in Poland in 1939. In view of that expectation, Hitler would likely have thought of his declaration of war on the USA on 11 December 1941 much as Argentines may have thought of their country's declaration of war on Germany on 27 March 1945, a costless gesture designed to appease a nervous ally.

If we look back at the events between May 1940 and December 1941, not in the light of the Allies' eventual victory, but of the United Kingdom's probable defeat, both Washington's demands and London's acquiescence in them become far less of a scandal. Even if Germany had not chosen to occupy Britain after its defeat, it is likely that the Nazi regime would have found ways to help itself to at least as much of Britain's gold reserves and other financial assets as the USA in fact claimed, making the Reich a major presence in business in the USA and the leading economic power in Latin America. Had the Nazis added Britain's naval bases and other imperial assets in the Western Hemisphere to this economic power, the USA would have been entirely incapable of making a contribution to any war against either Germany or Japan.

In that light, I think we can see the Roosevelt government's demands and the Churchill government's concessions as a kind of super-Dunkirk. Without actually making British surrender more likely, these concessions represented the choice of a postwar environment in which the far Western boundary of German power would in no case exceed the shores of the Atlantic. Even in the event of the absolute worst case scenario for the UK, in which the Germans occupied and subjugated Britain, a great power would still exist somewhere in the world that was neither fascist nor communist, with a population that speaks English and courts that occasionally cite Magna Carta. Such a power might not be in a position to intervene militarily on the island of Britain, but its example could embolden guerrilla resistance to the Germans. A United Kingdom government of the period may even have harbored the fond wish that the continued viability of the USA might foster a certain residue of respect for Englishness even among Nazi occupiers. This fond wish may look silly in retrospect, as we consider what we know of the Nazi regime, but at the time might not have been an altogether contemptible basis for policy.

The alternative surrender scenario, in which the British Empire had held onto enough of its assets for its fall to terminate the USA as a world power, would in the short term have given Germany and Japan free hands in their expansionist programs. Considering how wildly those programs were inflated beyond each country's ability to support them, in particular with regard to Germany's invasion of Russia and Japan's invasion of China, it seems likely that they would eventually have collapsed and brought the regimes down with them.

But that only makes the idea of Germany capturing a more-or-less-intact British Empire the more frightening. On the one hand, the Germans, unbothered by the nuisance of a Western front, would doubtless have had time to complete their extermination of European Jewry and to make great headway in their genocidal plans against Gypsies and others. On the other, the force that would eventually have defeated the Germans would not have included the USA, the UK, or any other democratic governments. The Soviet Union alone would have defeated the Reich, and the Red Army would have swept into all the territories it had once controlled. Perhaps that would have been rather a different Soviet Union than the one that actually existed in the late 1940s or early 1950s; it's easy to imagine that Stalin, for example, would not have survived had the Second World War gone much worse than it did for the USSR. But even if the Wehrmacht had done as well against the Soviet Union as Napoleon did against the Tsar, surely it would in the end have been defeated even more thoroughly than was the Grande Armee.

And without the USA in the Western Pacific, Japan's eventual, surely inevitable defeat in China would have come when the Kuomintang forces were even more completely exhausted than they were in 1945. That would have left Mao's Red Army to pick up the pieces, not only in mainland China, but in surrounding countries as well. With no American forces in the region to offer an alternative, the Japanese occupations may have proved merely a prelude to a domination of East Asia by Chinese Communists, as the victories of the Third Reich may have been a prelude to the domination of the rest of the Eastern hemisphere by the Soviet Union.

A nightmare world, certainly. And, as with all nightmares, it grows from long chains of contingency. But I don't think that any of these contingencies are either inherently unlikely to have happened, or unlikely to have haunted the minds of British and American policymakers in the period May 1940-December 1941.

A footnote to Mr Hitchens' excellent piece on the so-called "special relationship": when Averell Harriman, who played an important role in the Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy and Johnson administrations, addressed his staff in the US embassy in Moscow at the beginning of 1946, he stated, "England is so weak she must follow our leadership...She will do anything we insist [upon] and she won't go out on a limb alone." Half-a-century later, in 1997, Blair adviser, Jonathan Powell, told the newly appointed British ambassador to the United States, "We want you to get up the arse of the White House and stay there."

In response to Mr Stephenson, Admiral Burke's words were indeed transcribed at the same time the recording were made (whether they were transcribed from the recordings or direct from Admiral Burke I am not sure, and I doubt if anyone is at this distance. Either is, it is true, possible). These transcripts have been available and known to some researchers for some time, though in my view they have never before been given anything like the prominence they deserve. Certainly nobody has sought to use Admiral Burke';s actual voice in a TV or radio programme, as I have done.

They are (for instance) mentioned in the late Keith Kyle's excellent book on Suez, which is how I got on to them. When I first read them, my jaw dropped and I wondered why the story was not better known.

However, the actual recordings were subject to very stringent limitations on use, thanks to the agreements reached between the Admiral and the Library at the time they were made. It is my understanding that they not been played since 1966. It took some time to obtain the necessary permissions to play them,Also, they were stored on obsolete reel-to-reel tapes for which the library no longer had a player, and so they had to be digitized before I could listen to them.

You say that, in respect of the recording in question, ‘I and the librarian, are the first people to have listened to it since it was made in January 1966, almost 50 years ago.’

This cannot be right, unless there are of course other copies.

The conversation between the admiral and the politician is mentioned in an article by Michael H Coles that dates from 2006:

‘Later Admiral Burke vividly recalled what the international repercussions could have been. When asked by Dulles whether the Sixth Fleet could halt the operation, Burke responded, “Mr. Secretary, we can stop them, but we will blast hell out of them.”’*

We could not do another Falklands war again because we will have no British made and maintained aircraft on our new carriers. So if US policy does not favour such an intervention they will simply withdraw supply of maintenance and parts.

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